Experts: Race still an issue

To the Rev. Kelvin Kelley, assistant professor of theology at Hardin-Simmons University, it’s “OK to call anyone what they desire to be called.” “I’m pretty flexible with labels,” Kelley said.

Felder believes it’s dangerous to not recognize the individual backgrounds of children.

Robert Lilly

Brice said attempts at colorblindness aren’t being true to history.

Kelvin Kelley

Throughout the long march toward greater rights, terms used to describe blacks have served as ever-changing mirrors, both for those reflected and society as a whole.

In many cases, “there’s a quest for identity in terms of culture and in terms of race,” mused Dr. Alfreddie Felder, an assistant professor of education at Abilene Christian University.

Abilene minister Tony Roach agreed, describing the shifting terminology as an “awareness process,” one that has required adjustments in how blacks see themselves and others.

Throughout history, such terms have ranged from hurtful to a source of pride and power.

But from “slave” to “free,” from “black” to “African-American,” and perhaps beyond, each is a link on a chain of being and becoming, those who took the time to ruminate on the subject said.

And while it may be tempting, especially in the modern era, to attempt to divorce oneself from racial terms completely in the name of understanding or political correctness, in the view of some such as Tanya Brice, it’s not OK to “just be people” — for a variety of reasons.

Such attempts at colorblindness, while they may be at times understandable, aren’t being true to both the history of this country and all those who inhabit it, said Brice, director of the graduate social work program at ACU.

“I’m a woman, and a woman of color — and both of those mean something,” she said. “For us to not consider that is not being honest.”

To Brice, ignoring one’s racial background is akin to trying to put a bandage on history in an area marked by palpable violence and — at times — indescribable hurt.

“To deny color is to deny my history, your history, and American history,” she said. “There’s a part of me that has to be appreciated because I am a woman and because I am of African descent.”

Abilene youth worker and ex-offender advocate Robert Lilly said that as long as issues of racism are not addressed in our society, racial identifiers will continue to have relevance.

To the Rev. Kelvin Kelley, assistant professor of theology at Hardin-Simmons University, it’s “OK to call anyone what they desire to be called.”

“I’m pretty flexible with labels,” Kelley said, who said that in his experience, preference for a term such as “black” or “African-American” tends to say more about the generation someone grew up in than anything else.

In Kelley’s estimation, honoring a person’s humanity is more important than the label one puts on them.

But while agreeing with that basic statement, many said that dealing with the at-times ugly history of racial terms, applied to blacks and to others, was necessary for understanding and growth.

Petty Hunter, who heads the Abilene chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke of the “socioeconomic construct” of race, the notion of a group of people having an “insignificant” human value but important socioeconomic value in terms of a low-cost workforce.

It is a concept that has not only been applied to blacks in the United States, he said, but also has been a reality at various points for Chinese workers, American Indians and Mexican-Americans.

But to Hunter, “it was a socioeconomic design that put us in this boat,” he said, perhaps unintentionally raising the specter of the transatlantic slave trade that brought blacks to North America from the 16th century into the 1800s.

It was then, Brice said, when blacks’ identities were stripped from them, the nationalities of their slavers determining future names and fostered identities.

“They did not have a sense of who they were,” Brice said. “And any quest for that was harmful to them.”

The term “Negro,” once considered an appropriate and socially-acceptable term for blacks, finds its origin in the 1440s, when Portuguese sailors looking for a sea route to India arrived instead in sub-Saharan Africa.

Another common, albeit far more offensive term, springs from the same origin.

Other references gained traffic in their own time.

The designation “coloured” began gaining in popularity in the colonial era, applying initially not only to blacks but to a variety of other racial groups before becoming tinged with more purely negative, and specific, meaning.

The spelling of the term eventually became Americanized, Felder said.

“That had a negative connotation, because it had to do with Jim Crow laws and colored-only and white-only, that sort of thing,” she said, referring to laws that lasted until the mid-1960s creating racial segregation in public facilities and maintaining a “separate but equal” duality.

The NAACP was born out of the early 20th century efforts of a variety of individuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, the sole black person on its first executive board.

“Black” became common in the 1960s, representing a substantial change and being seen by many as a source of empowerment and pride.

“It became a word that evoked a positive identity for blacks,” Felder said, though not everyone was enamored with what some saw as a merely skin-deep description.

But some had a desire to reclaim even more identity, leading to the modern and widely-accepted “African-American.”

“An African-American is a person of African descent who has deliberately chosen to seek out his historical, economical, social and religious background, and he acts according to his awareness,” Roach said in defining the term.

But even that has not been completely satisfying to some.

Brice said she has heard, for example, some suggest “Africans in America” and even the acronym AUSA, Africans in the United States of America, as alternatives, derived from a sense of still not yet belonging to the greater whole and continued sense of social and economic disparity.

Ongoing Dialogue

Felder said — echoing several others — that she feels people are in the middle on an “ongoing dialogue” when it comes to race, no matter what terms may or may not be applied in the future.

And she believes it’s dangerous to not recognize and appreciate the individual backgrounds of children, especially in an educational context.

“Those differences need to valued, those differences to be appreciated,” she said. “We all don’t come from the same place, we all don’t come from the same experiences.”

Brice agreed, saying to ignore one’s racial background is to “ignore that full person.”

Part of the reason discussing terms of race and identity is vexing, Brice said, is that too often differences have brought dissension.

At its worst, struggling for terms to delineate one another racially is a “cultural construct” that has held all of us in bondage, she said, one that stops us from learning to “love one another.”

“That shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind, but it is what really hinders us having relationships with each other,” she said. “We’re worried about offending.”

Injustices both past and present will not be properly dealt with until we approach them openly, said Lilly, who is open in that he considers much of what is termed progress in racial matters to be “illusory.”

Genuine disparities remain in several areas, he said, ranging from education to economics to the criminal justice system.

And even now, he said, many blacks have difficulties embracing their racial identity, worried that doing so will be in some way seen as desiring to see others fall, he said.

To Lilly, race is a “fiction,” one he feels may have served its purpose.

“It only continues to divide us,” he said, adding that theology, politics and other societal pillars have tended to support such a construct.

But an understanding of history, he said, has helped him both see the path of those who have preceded him and where he and others must now travel.

“I’ve made it my life’s work to see a more inclusive community, a more inclusive society,” he said. “Those are lofty ideas, but I do think they are attainable.”

“I’m a woman, and a woman of color — and both of those mean something. For us to not consider that is not being honest.”